[Monotone-devel] Re: strange charset problem?

[Graydon Hoare]

Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 08:38:49PM +0100, Markus Schiltknecht wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've found the bug: I've added a '--verbose' flag, which seems 
> > deprecated. Sorry for the noise.
>
> --verbose is totally warty (right now it means "use a randomly
> different output format when doing either 'mtn annotate' or 'mtn
> complete'"), but it still shouldn't make commands fail with
> incomprehensible error messages...
>
> IDNA has to do with i18n-ized domain names; not sure what they have to
> do with cvs_import.

ACE means "ASCII compatible encoding", it's a term for the various 
encodings that the IDNA specs are designed to project into. Only one is 
in any use these days: if you see a string that begins "xn--" it's an 
IDNA ACE string under nameprep+punycode. I think it dates from back when 
we used SMTP and NNTP transports. I think I picked ACE as an encoding 
for a few of the data types like branch names, host names and key names 
to make them easier to map onto the non-8-bit-clean SMTP/NNTP 
infrastructure (mail hosts, protocol strings, headers, etc).

It's mostly historical cruft, but continues to be the constraint on 
several of monotone's datatypes. Many operations will be constrained by 
them, not just networking. See:

http://venge.net/monotone/docs/Internationalization.html

-graydon